Best Practices

Ninjas on a Mission: Things to Know When Migrating Your Splunk Deployment

Posted by Natalie Kalas on Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 11:48 Best Practices, Operational Intelligence Splunk, Best Practices, Splunk Migrations

Splunk is a journey. Whether you are a newbie playing around with Splunk on your local machine or have a multi-instance distributed Splunk deployment, your knowledge of Splunk is always evolving. Typically, the more you know about Splunk, the more you want to do with Splunk. Often, proof of concepts (POCs) turn into production environments and soon enough you’re increasing your license and looking into new architecture. Congratulations, you have become a full on Splunk ninja! Now, how do we migrate your current Splunk deployment to ‘beefier’ hardware,...

Have You Learned Your Lesson?

Posted by Puja Katari on Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - 12:32 Best Practices Best Practices, lessons learned, continuous improvement process

Does your organization emphasize the importance of lessons learned? Aside from occasional references to past project failures, few organizations give much thought to learning about the past. In my experience, this is a best practice area that is most often minimized or entirely overlooked. Lessons learned process is one that crosses functional boundaries and allows an organization to learn from both its mistakes and its successes. An effective process should prevent us from repeating mistakes and ensure that we continue to use methods that were successful. It should be an instrumental...

Accelerated Data Models in a Distributed Splunk Environment

Posted by Rupak Pandya on Friday, January 31, 2014 - 14:37 Operational Intelligence, Best Practices acceleration, Best Practices, Big data, data model, Splunk, Splunk 6

Splunk v6.0.1 is packed with new features that enhance the user experience and can provide useful, lightning fast reports. For a full overview of the new features check out this link: Splunk 6!

One of the new features that provide users the ability to build exceptionally fast reports is data models. Users can use the structure provided by the data models to create pivot tables, all without knowing Splunk’s search language. Pivot users select the data model they are interested in, then point and click their...

Say my name, say my name...

Posted by Neena Bhutiani on Friday, August 30, 2013 - 14:46 Operational Intelligence, Best Practices Best Practices, Splunk, UI

As a consultant, I get asked this question from my clients all the time. They use Splunk everyday and when they log in they see this screen:

splunk_login_0.png

...

Splunk, Where's my Props?!

Posted by Neena Bhutiani on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - 13:48 Operational Intelligence, Best Practices Best Practices, Data Inputs, Splunk

Here’s the scenario. You find the perfect app for your data. You onboard the data, configure all your files, look through all your dashboards to finally see the views you have been waiting for. Then your greatest fear is realized, your dashboards are not working! You trouble shoot the searches in your dashboards and the fields that are needed for this search do not exist. Where are your field extractions?

Once you see that everything seems to be configured right on your app, you go through the TA apps you installed to make sure everything is working together. Everything seems to be...

Passing Time

Posted by Rupak Pandya on Thursday, April 4, 2013 - 13:00 Operational Intelligence, Best Practices Best Practices, Big data, Machine data, props.conf, Splunk, Web Analytics, XML

System monitoring dashboards are something we are often asked to provide for our clients. Normally, this is a pretty straight forward task, but on a recent client engagement, I was presented with one requirement that was a bit out of the ordinary. This client was looking to monitor a set of ten desktops with a real-time dashboard that would display in their office. They wanted to see all of the standard metrics like cpu, memory, and disk. If there was a spike in a time chart for say % CPU Usage, they wanted to be able to click on the spike and drill down into another view. They wanted the...

Setting up a Simple Workflow in Oracle WebCenter Sites

Posted by Somen De on Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - 12:00 Web Experience Management, Best Practices Best Practices, Content Management Systems, FatWire, Oracle WebCenter Sites, Web Experience Management, WEM, workflow

Welcome fellow enthusiasts of Oracle WebCenter Sites, to an introductory blog about how to set up a simple workflow! As we all know, workflow is an integral aspect of any web content management system, and thus creating an efficient workflow is paramount to the overall success of the system and it’s business owners.

The particular workflow we will design is modest yet effective.

There are 2 main Roles of users:

ContentAuthor – creates/edits content
ContentApprover – approves content for publishing

Go ahead and create these 2 Roles, and...

Passwords: Sharks Can Smell a Breach a Mile Away

Posted by Jon Reid on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 - 14:22 Best Practices, Cool Tools, Data Security Best Practices, Cool Tools, Security

2013 is not shaping up to be a banner year for Internet security. 2012 saw data breaches like 6.5 million LinkedIn password hashes leaked, 420,000 member accounts from social network Formspring, Yahoo! Voices more than 400,000 usernames and passwords, 1.5 million passwords from the online dating site eHarmony. Twitter is the latest system to suffer an embarrassing security breach with accompanying data loss. Approximately 250,000 accounts holders have had their usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords stolen. Twitter has been as proactive as...

Setting Up a Development Environment in Oracle WebCenter Sites

Posted by Somen De on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - 15:02 Web Experience Management, Development, Best Practices Best Practices, CSDT, Development, FatWire, GSF, Oracle WebCenter Sites, Web Experience Management, WEM

Function1 would like to take this opportunity to welcome Mike Field (co-author of this blog) to our Web Experience Management team. Mike joins us from Metastratus Web Solutions and brings in-depth expertise in all aspects of Oracle WebCenter Sites. Mike and I worked together on creating a development environment in Oracle WebCenter Sites for a client and decided to document the process.

As all of us enthusiastic developers know, setting up an initial development environment can sometimes be a tedious and painstaking process, regardless of the platform or software we use. It can...

Security Hardening Open Source Projects

Posted by Jon Reid on Wednesday, October 31, 2012 - 12:35 Best Practices, Data Security, Development Best Practices, Development, Drupal, Security

A client recently had a stream of attacks on several of their online applications. Thanks to excellent monitoring, solid architecture and nice, clean installations, the attacks were easily rebuffed. Cheers to all involved. Just the same, the attacks gave me some insights on what a typical attack vector looks like to an online intruder. There were certainly some patterns in the commands directed at each server or application. As I said, the client faired very well. However, the incident gave us an excellent opportunity to review our monitoring efforts and even more interesting, our security...